Time to dread

This article examines ecological thought and eschatology, an interpretation of the end of the world. It draws upon the teachings of the Quran and the knowledge of Bosnian Muslim beekeepers to explore how climate disasters and global bee colony collapses affect people's lives and the environment. The article examines how these changes alter the relationships between plants, animals and humans and suggests that eco-eschatology can help us better understand and address the crisis. It also suggests that, instead of despairing or giving up, we should seek insight and advice on what we can do in the face of ‘the End’ and take solace in the generosity of God.     

Proceedings at Monthly Meetings of the Royal Archaeological Institute

The importance of training areas to the militarization of the landscape in the twentieth century is well recognized, but many sites remain unexplored and unrecorded. This article discusses the archaeology of a Second World War landscape at Westleton Walks, near Dunwich in Suffolk. The principal remains are those of a mock German ‘Hedgehog’ defensive position built in the spring of 1943 for use in Exercise ‘Kruschen’, an extended trial of techniques and equipment that went on to inform the successful Allied campaign in north-west Europe the following year. The archaeology of the site is significant both as a case study of a Second World War training landscape and also because the remains can be given a precise historical context.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015     

‘Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity,Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground

This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, virtuality is no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world.     

‘Concrete bodies’: young Latina women transgressing the boundaries of race and class in white inner-city Stockholm

This article examines young Latina women's interactions in the urban landscape of Stockholm, with a particular focus on white, middle-class areas, and how social difference and racial positioning are produced in and through the processes of urban segregation. Although Stockholm consists of different multiethnic and middle-class white suburbs, a discourse of sharp division between ‘the suburb’ and the inner-city is prevalent in the daily press. Here ‘the suburb’ is either portrayed as dangerous or exotic. This article is based on qualitative research with 29 young Latina women living and attending schools in both the suburban and inner-city areas. This approach facilitates an understanding of how gendered, racialized and classed aspects of segregation are embodied in multiple directions and how mechanisms of spatial exclusion prevail in predominantly white areas – often seen as ‘neutral’ or non-racialized areas. In conclusion, in order to capture the realities of young people's lives within materialized discourses of race and space, I argue that it is crucial to include white settings in the analysis, and experiences of exclusion.     

Maritime Archaeology and Climate Change: An Invitation

Maritime archaeology has a tremendous capacity to engage with climate change science. The field is uniquely positioned to support climate change research and the understanding of past human adaptations to climate change. Maritime archaeological data can inform on environmental shifts and submerged sites can serve as an important avenue for public outreach by mobilizing public interest and action towards understanding the impacts of climate change. Despite these opportunities, maritime archaeologists have not fully developed a role within climate change science and policy. Moreover, submerged site vulnerabilities stemming from climate change impacts are not yet well understood. This article discusses potential climate change threats to maritime archaeological resources, the challenges confronting cultural resource managers, and the contributions maritime archaeology can offer to climate change science. Maritime archaeology’s ability to both support and benefit from climate change science argues its relevant and valuable place in the global climate change dialogue, but also reveals the necessity for our heightened engagement.     

Science,landscape archaeology and public participation: The Community Landscape Project,Devon, UK

Abstract

This paper presents and describes the background to the Community Landscape Project (CLP), which commenced in Devon in 2001 with funding from sources that include the United Kingdom Heritage Lottery Fund. The project is concerned with increasing public participation in landscape archaeology and, unusually, palaeoenvironmental studies, with the aim of dispelling the myth that archaeology is only about excavation and ‘finds’. The paper describes the project's genesis and its success in increasing public participation in landscape archaeology. The unusual features of the project include its scientific palaeoenvironmental content, both in the field and in the laboratory (environmental stratigraphy and pollen analysis) and its use of GIS. It is argued that this kind of project, with external or charity funding, has become essential because of a high demand coupled with a funding gap between the government, local societies and universities. Lessons have been learnt and some of these are summarised here with the aim of helping others to devise and run innovative and inclusive community archaeology projects.     

Archaeology from below

Abstract

This paper identifies and discusses two contrasting approaches to field archaeology in contemporary Britain. The dominant approach is that of ‘official archaeology’ rooted in professional rescue (or contract) work and represented by bodies such as English Heritage, county archaeology units and the Institute of Field Archaeologists. This ‘archaeology from above’ threatens alternative approaches to fieldwork, since state legislation and other bureaucratic controls are being used to restrict access to archaeology to an elite of self-accredited practitioners, and a persuasive and sophisticated ideology of heritage ‘protection’ and professional ‘standards’ is being deployed to legitimize this policy. This attempt to universalize the practices of professional rescue archaeology is academically incoherent and politically undemocratic. An alternative ‘archaeology from below’ is proposed in which fieldwork is rooted in the community, open to volunteer contributions, organised in a non-exclusive, non-hierarchical way, and dedicated to a research agenda in which material, methods and interpretation are allowed to interact. These points are illustrated with detailed references to the experience of ‘democratic archaeology’ on the author's project at Sedgeford in northwest Norfolk in 1996–98.     

The State We're in on the Eve of World Archaeological Congress (WAC) 6: Archaeology in Ireland vs Corporate Takeover and a Reply from University College Dublin

Abstract

There has been a change in how the state in Ireland uses archaeology since the 1990s, when it began collaboration with the private sector on large-scale development. Most archaeologists are now employed by private companies on temporary, short-term contracts. As in other countries, this has happened in tandem with increasing bureaucratic, corporate control of universities and pressure on academics to orient teaching to meet the needs of industry. This is an inevitable expression of expansion by multi-national corporations, often part of the ‘spreading democracy’ which, updating a famous phrase, can be characterised as a US-led ‘war by other means’. I present a case study of that process unfolding in one country, focusing on road development, the corruption upon which it is necessarily founded, and the role of archaeology. The M3 motorway which threatens the landscape of the Hill of Tara provides a good example. Crucial questions of professional ethics and standards, particularly professionals’ accountability to the community, have been sidelined. WAC 6 will be held in University College Dublin in June 2008; this congress will be pivotal because WAC will decide for or against archaeologists’ accountability to communities and their life-or-death struggle for survival, and for or against embedding the profession with cultural destruction in the private sector. A reply from University College Dublin follows this article.     

The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics

This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP‐21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. It argues that the Paris Agreement breaks new ground in international climate policy, by acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of ‘naming and shaming’. By sidestepping distributional conflicts, the Paris Agreement manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation. It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom‐up logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate accountability and a ‘ratchet mechanism’, thus offering the chance of more durable international cooperation. At the same time, it is far from clear whether the treaty can actually deliver on the urgent need to de‐carbonize the global economy. The past record of climate policies suggests that governments have a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of ‘pledge and review’ will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and generate political momentum behind more substantial climate policies worldwide. It matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement's new approach can be made to work.     

A Multi‐disciplinary Approach to the Archaeological Investigation of a Bedrock‐Dominated Shallow‐Marine Landscape: an example from the Bay of Firth,Orkney, UK

Investigation of shallow‐marine environments for submerged prehistoric archaeology can be hampered in many localities by extensive bedrock exposure and thus limited preservation potential. Using the concept of ‘seamless archaeology’ where land‐based archaeology is integrated across the intertidal zone through to the offshore, a multi‐disciplinary approach is essential. This approach taken in the Bay of Firth, Orkney uses geophysics, historical archive and ethno‐archaeology, coastal geomorphology, palaeo‐environmental analyses and sea‐level science, and allows a clearer understanding of the landscape in which prehistoric settlers lived. While acknowledging the limitations of the preserved environment, we are successful in identifying areas of archaeological potential on the sea‐bed for both upstanding structural elements as well as sediment preservation that contains evidence for human occupation. This has wider implications beyond Orkney's World Heritage sites to provide a blueprint for similar studies elsewhere in the coastal zone. © 2012 The Authors     

Romans and Reducing Recidivism: Archaeology,Social Benefit,and Working with Offenders in Wales (Part 1)

Claims that public and community archaeology can help ‘change lives’ have recently come under criticism. Challenging these critiques, this article explores how archaeology can be socially beneficial in the rehabilitation of offenders. Using a case study from South Wales, this article demonstrates how a prison-based outreach project can offer an innovative trajectory for public archaeology, highlighting the links between archaeology and political agendas. The article challenges the concept of ‘archaeologist-as-social-worker’ and considers the successes and limitations of such an approach, including the challenges of measuring impact. Ultimately, it demonstrates that archaeology-based activities can provide positive life experiences for offenders, but only through a successful partnership between heritage and offender management specialists, as part of a wider programme of support and intervention.     

SOUSA VITERBO AND THE IDEA OF INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of Sousa Viterbo's contribution to industrial archaeology. This Portuguese historian and archaeologist not only employed and printed both the terms ‘archaeology of industry’ and ‘industrial archaeology’ in the late 19th century, but also left behind a number of writings which secure his place as a true ancestor of the current industrial archaeology. Selected excerpts of three of Viterbo's texts written between 1896 and 1902 are here translated into English for the first time.     

Local gender contract and adaptive capacity in smallholder irrigation farming: a case study from the Kenyan drylands

This article presents the local gender contract of a smallholder irrigation farming community in Sibou, Kenya. Women's role in subsistence farming in Africa has mostly been analyzed through the lens of gender division of labor. In addition to this, we used the concept of ‘local gender contract’ to analyze cultural and material preconditions shaping gender-specific tasks in agricultural production, and consequently, men's and women's different strategies for adapting to climate variability. We show that the introduction of cash crops, as a trigger for negotiating women's and men's roles in the agricultural production, results in a process of gender contract renegotiation, and that families engaged in cash cropping are in the process of shifting from a ‘local resource contract’ to a ‘household income contract.’ Based on our analysis, we argue that a transformation of the local gender contract will have a direct impact on the community's adaptive capacity climate variability. It is, therefore, important to take the negotiation of local gender contracts into account in assessments of farming communities' adaptive capacity.     

The impotence of being earnest? Avoiding the pitfalls of ‘creative middle power diplomacy’

This article critically evaluates Australia's ‘creative middle power diplomacy’, encapsulated in the three pillars of the Labor government's foreign policy platform. It notes that each pillar has been accorded specific roles in the implementation of Australian foreign policy and makes particular reference to the government's preference for multilateral engagement. The article subsequently demonstrates that such an agenda actually impedes a creative approach to key issues such as trade, climate change and non-proliferation challenges, as well as Australia's participation in Asia-Pacific order-building. It then offers some suggestions for a more flexible posture that is not inconsistent with past Labor approaches, but which also better appreciates regional and global complexities.     

Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria's descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria's pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.     

Mooring subjects of heritage: proprioceptive emplacement at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

This article examines how visitors to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (HSIBJ) in Fort Macleod, Alberta, are physically and affectively situated within an immersive heritage landscape. A designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, HSIBJ is inextricably tied to regional Blackfoot and settler-colonial histories, as well as the tensions that emerge between the two. HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre is organised to plunge audiences inside the ‘live’ archaeological scene and an evocative heritage landscape. It does so through technologies, including motion-triggered projections, which locate and secure visitors within official national – and universal – heritage narratives. The central argument of this article is that HSIBJ’s Interpretive Centre beckons subjects of heritage through proprioception, the awareness of the body’s position in and movement through space. Extending beyond the physiological sensation of one’s own body, proprioception also works alongside the two other substantiating buttresses of archaeology and heritage to provide a gravitational ground upon which the visitor is located and their subjectivity confirmed. Proprioceptive grounding emplaces a body within an expanded and ‘ancient’ narratology of nation, and in this way, also becomes the mechanism through which exogenous settlers assuage anxieties about their latecoming status.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 39, Number 5. October 2023

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 5 IBN KHALDUN AND RE-TRIBALIZATION A bust of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), at the entrance of the Kasbah of Bejaia, Algeria. As you gaze upon this scholar, who first delved into the cyclical dynamics of tribes and civilizations, you are not just looking at history — you are looking at a mirror reflecting our modern world. Khaldun's pioneering insights into tribal cohesion (asabiyyah) and its impact on societal rise and fall are not relics of the past; they are prophetic echoes reverberating in today's global landscape. In an increasingly interconnected yet paradoxically fragmented world, the concept of ‘tribalism’ is making a surprising comeback. No longer confined to anthropology textbooks or remote communities, tribalism resurfaces in our political dialogues, social affiliations, and even international relations. But this is not your grandfather's tribalism; it is ‘re-tribalization’, a modern reimagining of ancient affiliations and loyalties shaping nations and rewriting global equations. In this issue, the first of a two-part article by Ahmed et al., ‘Re-tribalization in the 21st century’, peels back the layers of this complex phenomenon. It challenges the conventional wisdom that pits ‘tribalism’ against ‘civilization’, revealing instead a dynamic interplay that influences everything from state governance to globalization. Whether it is the UK Brexit vote, the rise of ethnonationalism in various countries or the enduring conflicts in the Middle East, the fingerprints of tribalism — and its modern avatar, re-tribalization — are unmistakably present. As we navigate the complexities of a world that is both a ‘global village’ and a patchwork of evolving tribal identities, the concept of re-tribalization serves as an analytical lens. This resurgence of tribal affiliations is a complex adaptation to the challenges and opportunities of a globalized world. The ancient codes of tribalism are being reinterpreted in the context of modern geopolitics and digital communication. While the old and the new may seem to be in tension, they are part of a complex dynamic that requires scrutiny. The ancient and the modern coexist in a world as fraught with conflict as it is ripe for cooperation. FOOTBALL AND CLIMATE CHANGE On the dwindling sands of Ariyallur Beach in the coastal hamlet of Ottummal, Malabar, India, children passionately kick a football around, savouring the shrinking space that remains for their cherished sport. Their laughter and shouts echo against a backdrop of rising tides and eroding shores, a poignant reminder of the impermanence of their playground. In this issue, Muhammed Haneefa delves into the heart of this coastal community to explore how the relentless rise in sea levels is not just a geographical alteration but a transformation of a way of life. He uncovers the erosion of subaerial beaches — once the lifeblood of the community's social and cultural fabric — and its devastating impact on leisure activities, most notably the deeply ingrained pastime of football. Haneefa also scrutinizes the local government's ‘managed retreat’ strategy, a well-intentioned but complex proposal that involves relocating these vulnerable communities away from their endangered coastal homes. While the plan may offer a temporary respite from the encroaching waters, it fails to account for the fisherfolk's profound emotional and cultural ties to their land and traditions. This article serves as a lens through which we can view climate change from the ground up. While satellite images and climatological data may provide a bird's-eye view of the planet's changing face, it is through the worm's-eye view of anthropologists and ethnographers like Haneefa that we truly understand the human cost. Here, climate change is not just a statistic or a future projection; it is a lived reality that is reshaping communities, altering identities and challenging the very essence of cultural heritage.     

Obituary—The Rev. Robert Mackenzie,M.A.

Abstract

This paper examines how CCTV-assisted bird-watching mediates people's relationship with a particular representation of an animal world. By focusing on people's interpretations and responses to CCTV camera technology at three bird-watching sites around Scotland, it is argued that the use of CCTV technology represents a qualitatively different mode of engaging with birds which has bearing on how this mediated animal world appears in and to people's everyday lives. It is asserted that the spatial relations invoked in the act of looking at birds through a CCTV lens inscribe a conceptual hyper-separation between see-er and seen that serve to normalise a vision of humanity inherently separate from and dominant over the wildlife on screen. As a technologically mediated way of seeing, the paper explores the use of CCTV cameras as inscribing particular ‘ways of being’ that serve to define and limit people's conduct towards the birds on view. By drawing attention to the conservation discourses that support, and are supported by the use of CCTV-assisted bird-watching, it is argued that the notion of ‘keeping an eye on nature’ is embedded in a cultural agenda that assists with the construction of nature as tele-visual commodity.     

Principled pragmatism in climate policy? The EU and changing practices of climate justice

Climate change constitutes one of the most pressing political problems of our time and has profound implications for global justice. However, despite the recent progress of the international negotiations embodied in the Paris Agreement, most scientists and activists agree that the adopted measures are not adequate or ‘just’ considering the magnitude of the problem. Thus, there is a pressing need for political forerunners that could push the regime towards a more just handling of the problem. The European Union for most of the time has presented itself as a strong advocate for progressive climate action and has been called a climate vanguard or ‘green normative power’. This paper critically assesses the EU's role concerning climate change from a perspective of global political justice, which builds on a tripartite theoretical conception, consisting of ‘non-domination’, ‘impartiality’ and ‘mutual recognition’. It inquires to which conceptions of justice the EU's climate strategy and approach to the international negotiations have corresponded, how and why changes have come about, and whether the EU was able to influence the international regime. The paper finds that while the EU started out from a focus on political measures linked to impartiality, after the failed negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 it has become more open towards policies and instruments in line with mutual recognition and non-domination. Thus, the emphasis moved away from top-down, legally binding measures, towards voluntary bottom-up procedures, a recognition of difference and diplomatic outreach activities. While this shift was necessary to reinstate the EU's influence and secure the Paris Agreement, it could hamper the quest for robust climate abatement measures and global climate justice.